An international team of researchers led by IBM Research Almaden and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have produced the world’s smallest magnet and demonstrated that it’s possible to use that magnet—an individual atom—to store a single bit of data. Existing hard drives use magnets made of about 1 million atoms to store a single bit of data. Using individual atoms as magnetic bits would radically increase the density of data storage.